


I Waited For the Joke- It Never Did Arrive

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Arkham Asylum, Gen, Hospitalization, Mental Illness, generally disturbing, incarceration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 08:51:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4473020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do you want to hear something funny?</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Waited For the Joke- It Never Did Arrive

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, I've warned for violence, but this is an unpleasant story, so take care, Dear Readers.  
> The title comes from a line in the song, Gentlemen, by the Afghan Whigs.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

Do you want to hear something funny? The beating she took at the hands of Leslie- excuse her, Dr. Leslie Thompkins- was way more severe than should have been required to merely disable her. The doctor in county lock-down tells Barbara that for nothing, once she's aware of her surroundings. Apparently, she was circling the drain for a while, there, courtesy of some swelling on her brain, which can happen to a person when her head gets slammed into marble tile half a dozen times. She was in a coma and everything, for five days. They were calling her parents' lawyers, trying to find out if she might want a priest to sit with her. All because of the good doctor.  
“Yet I'm the one who's locked up,” she rasps, with a giggle that even sounds wrong to her. All wrong. It hurts to hear how she sounds, now, but it's laugh or cry, so she quips, “'First do no harm', indeed.”  
The doctor frowns. Barbara wants to tell him to turn that frown upside down: this is a happy occasion! It might have been self-defense on Dr. Thompkins' part, but violence is violence. It's deeply reassuring to know that Jim might be able to deny certain things about himself, but he'll never be able to escape them in those he makes his life with.  
It's two full months before the doctors agree that Barbara can leave the hospital for Arkham. In her absence, her attorney put in a plea of 'Not guilty, by reason of mental disease or defect' to the charges brought against her. When she finally sees him during her first week in Arkham, after the hospital and the seemingly endless physical rehabilitation, where she has to learn to walk and talk and everything all over again, she tries to tell him that this isn't the way it's supposed to be. There's nothing wrong with her mind. Except that it is her mind. Jason might have been a perv and an abuser and a murderer, and he might have been wrong about so many things, but he was right about one. Her. Now, she has that debt of gratitude struck upon her, like a scar or a tattoo or a brand, for the rest of her life, forever: because of him, she knows the truth. About herself.  
“They say the truth will set you free- so why am I in here?” She means to say it very calmly, but her voice still goes out on her, and the words come in a strangled shriek, and that's when the big men begin pulling her out of the room.  
“Come on, Ms. Kean,” one of them rumbles gently, like he's trying to settle a spooked horse. It does actually make her relax. It still feels good to her, to be treated kindly. She's lost so much, be she hasn't lost that, yet. When she does, what will come in its stead; how will she then know comfort from others?  
Limits on self-expression aside, Arkham's not really so bad. It's actually kind of fun, being the only girl inmate in the restricted unit, where they keep the truly dangerous, as opposed to the merely reality-challenged, and she now resides. Aside from a few nurses and doctors, the staff there is mostly male. The women look right through her, but the men treat her with an odd sort of cautiousness that tickles her. As though, they might break her with a careless movement or word. Her skull, and her heart and her will have all been pummeled, cracked to ugliness and ruin, but never broken. Surely, in one of those places, the human spirit resides, and if they've all healed, webbed in scar tissue, literal and figurative, what does that make her? Sometimes, this is so humorous to her that she does actually start laughing, at the strangest times. Then, she clears her throat and blames it on her medication. It's nice, though, that there are still gentlemen in the world.  
There are, of course, the other kind of men, too; here, more than anywhere.  
“I'm gonna get you, Blondie,” one of them says- like, Oh, please, she's heard scarier things on the way to the bathroom in nightclubs. But she is just  
so tired  
so, so tired  
of people acting like she's nothing but a body. A body whose only possibilities lie in the pain and humiliation it can bring its owner.  
So, she asks amiably, “You know why I'm in here, right?”  
“A cat-fight, right?”  
“I tried to kill my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend.”  
He leans in close. “Well, you didn't do a very good job, if she's still walking around.”  
She just gives him that sassy little grin that big, stupid men think is so adorable. “That's because, to spite everything, I kind of liked her. But you, I don't like. So, what do you think I'm going to do to you?”  
“Ooh, tough girl-” he gets out before she claps one hand onto the back of his head, drawing him in as though for a kiss, and jams the thumb of the other into his eye socket. The sound he makes is terrific- a bleating, trilling scream blossoming into a roar- and she can't stop laughing. There's blood everywhere, and it's so weird to think that, a second ago, it was all inside of a person. She wants to comfort the man, tell him that her insides have become her outsides, too, and that it's not so bad, because then, people really know you, but more importantly, you know yourself. The words won't come, though, just more laughter, so she enjoys it, lets it shake through her body like electricity. Before the guards drag her away, she's buried her thumb in the other eye, as well, and after that, everyone suddenly remembers how to treat a lady.

Afterwards, it's medication and isolation, which is really like a long vacation. When they begin to taper off the tranquilizers, so that she's conscious more often than not, she just enjoys the soft haze of it all. She's a little boat on a very warm sea that splashes over her hull like a hand in the bathtub. There are people on the outside who would pay a lot to feel this way. She was one of them. Now, she gets to feel this way for free. When the fog clears a little more- a lighthouse! in the night!- she gets a lot of thinking done. It was never this easy to think before- with all of those people buzzing around her, her parents, and Jim, and Renee, and later, Jason. Everyone wants a piece of you, and if you don't stop them, fight for your life, they're going to take everything. It seems so strange to her, now, that she was so afraid of fighting.  
Violence is a lot like sex. After you do it for the first time, and you're still alive, you haven't disintegrated or flown off into space, you can't remember why you were ever scared of it. It gets easy; then, it gets fun; then, you want to do it all the time. You think about it when you aren't doing it. You begin to see the possibilities in other peoples' bodies. It becomes the answer to all of life's questions.  
Maybe she always had it wrong. Maybe it was never supposed to be sex, love, to color her life, but violence. Maybe this is why she was always drawn to certain people. Jim and Jason, and a dozen other men at varying levels of peace with their own violence, between the two opposite sides of that spectrum. Renee, who might be the last incorruptible police officer in Gotham, but a person doesn't decide to go into that line of work if she isn't comfortable with the idea that she might one day have to kill somebody. Renee might be valiant and true, but one day, she's going to fall, and fall far, and maybe Barbara will be there to see it. If she is, she's sure it'll be good for a giggle.  
It's funny: Barbara's never been lower- her parents are dead; she's been put away; the doctors aren't sure, but there's a good chance that she'll have permanent nerve damage- but things have never seemed quite so amusing. Suddenly, she sees the rich comedy in life, and she wants to be part of it; to observe, but also to contribute. She's never really had much of a sense of humor, but suddenly, she's sure that she's going to become quite the joker. And no one's going to laugh louder than she.


End file.
